The Tea Time TV sessions are online streamed events, each afternoon at 3 p.m. in the Auditorium (2nd floor) of Witte de With and TENT. during the festival period. Curatorial team: Edwin Carels, Adam Hyde, Stephen Kovats.

The Italian microTV movement, Telestreet, started as a loose group of TV micro-broadcasters that first went to air in Italy in 2002 in a neighborhood station based in Bologna. These loosely affiliated broadcasters share an enthusiasm for exploring the socializing power of free-to-air video (TV) broadcasting. Often their content is sourced from the independent content archives such as V2V and the Italian viral video distribution project NGV. However, in the words of their manifesto, “Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net […] the horizontally of the net must meet the ‘socializing’ power of television.”

In the words of David Garcia “[Telestreet] are squatting the shadows or blank spots which terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach.” They not only make their own content, but also their own transmitters and antenna. Dedicated to the socializing power of broadcast television, the project has provided an important inspiration for many Italian media activists, and has fueled a movement dedicated to the development of critical approaches to localized production and distribution of TV.

Silent_tv will be a tele-matic workshop on how to build your own tv.
For many years Tetsuo Kogawa has taught workshops, showing people how to build their own FM transmitters from simple electronic components. These workshops also provoke those involved to consider the technical, political, and social ramifications electromagnetic broadcasts. By building transmitters the workshop participants inevitably deconstruct broadcasting, challenging their own notions of what broadcasting is now and what it could be.

For silent_tv Kogawa will take a rare break from his primary love, radio, to lead a “Build your own TV” workshop. Participants will build their own television transmitters from basic electronic components and use the transmitters to broadcast content made at the Satellite of Love open door studios. No experience in electronics is necessary to attend this workshop, and all materials will be provided.
Registration for this workshop via [email protected] is necessary as there will be a limited number of places available. All parts and tools provided gratis.

Sunday 29 January, 15:00 hrs
GATED_TV
Gated_tv will deal with copy right issues vs open archives, open source, open archives.

What new potential does digital television usher in for the creative viewer? While the BBC is opening up their archive for visitors, and initiatives such as The Internet Archive¹ (www.archive.org) keep Net memory in an active state of flux, a shrinking violet of a standards body is crafting a new regime of restrictions, molding television’s future into its own likeness. Europe’s imminent broadcast flag could ban open source for digital TV, short-circuit the devices in your living room and shackle us into being a truly captive audience. As disregarded consumers we’ve much to fear from behind the closed doors of the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting Project), an industry-led consortium and self-enthroned standards adoption nanny, mandating world-wide across every channel of television broadcast. If viewing behavior can be monitored and recording severely restricted, who ends up watching whom ? is this genuinely an issue restricted to merely upholding a lexicon of copyrights?

Monday 30 January, 15:00 hrs
TRUTH_TV
TRUTH_TV will bring together several artists to discuss their work exploring the nature of truth as represented by television.

“To distinguish enemies from friends we have to depend on our own personal interpretation of fragmented pieces of (visual) information sent to us by the media. In principle every single piece of third hand information is a lie…” Geert Mul’s (Rotterdam) project MATCH MAKER applies algorithms to pixel to find matches between thousands of satellite broadcast images, pairing images that share formal composition similarities. Mul’s work questions the role of composition and its role in constructing truth within the television frame.

The Yes Men are culture jammers that have successfully sold lies to the media. They have recently passed themselves off as representatives on BBC news of Dow Chemicals, the owner of Union Carbide, and claimed responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster.

Perry Bard is a New York artist who’s working with electronic media. Her recent public video installations are site specific and address cultural history and memory often involving local community members in the production process. Bard’s current work is about the US intervention in Iraq, and has examined the role of the media in the US elections.

Etymologically, television is a Greco-Roman hybrid of ‘far’ and ‘sight’ and as anyone can easily verify via earth.google.com, few swathes of territory are left unmapped or visually undefiled. But to whom does this God’s eye view belong? On 28 December, Europe launched its own Galileo satellite as a “civilian” counterbalance to the American military’s GPS-system. When will Africa ever join this race to the outer orbits? And what’s the deeper teleological prop to the television apparatus? Isn’t it just another explicit chapter in a longer media-historical preponderance upon surveillance technologies? Not so long ago, satellite-imagery remained something restrained to movie industry light and magic (e.g. Enemy of State, 1999), but it’s already become one of television’s stylistic tropes. Where does this leave the artist? How can we challenge this already ubiquitously innocuous technology and its accompanying baggage of eidetic imagery?

Television’s birth pangs coincided with the very height of modernist art, the boom of non-objective suprematism also occurring during the mid twenties. Although the nascent medium was subsequently adopted by national institutions, recognized as being an ideal carrier for transmissions of social and cultural thrust, artists’ aspirations to dent the flow of info-entertainment has remained marginal. Only with the advent of consumer-video and a significant re-tooling could artists begin responding on something of their own terms. Now that programs even featuring art are becoming next to invisible amongst even the most high-minded of public service broadcasters, the available technology is such that artists can potentially create their own channels, narrow-casting or unicasting their own personal vision of television. This is a look on how television became art practice, and how art can feedback into television practice.